Good News, Bad News

Good News:

The Library of Congress has announced that they will acquire and catalog the entirety of Twitter essentially since its inception.  This isn't so much good news because it will be saving for posterity any particularly mind-boggling profound or important toots, but because it is the beginning of a new kind of historical record in which events are documented and commented on in real time by thousands of people.  Imagine what our understanding of events like Pompeii or Henry VIII's divorce might be like if something like Twitter had existed then.

Bad News: 

The passage of the Digital Economy Act in Britain is a bitch-slap to the face of the future.  It's just about the most egregiously stupid piece of legislation passed by any modern democratic government I can think of.  And that includes the Patriot Act.  Nothing pisses me off more than laws pushed through by a bunch of old men who have had more than a decade to adapt to the digital age and instead would like to insist that their busted-ass business model will work just fine thank you—as long as they have the courts and the government to protect them.

Good News:

 Andy Bechtolsheim is the David Bowie of the Internet: always years ahead of his time and already a living legend.  His new company has just announced that they can make the internet—or your intranet—move twice as fast at a third the cost.  Megaswitches like these make the net go round, and the faster and cheaper they get, the easier it will be to spread truly high speed internet around the world.   

Bad News:

An offshore oil rig holding 700,000 gallons of diesel fuel suffered a massive explosion and then sunk, creating the potential for a massive environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.   Particularly because the well they had been working is still spewing thousands of gallons of oil into the ocean.  Drill, baby, drill.

Good News:

 WhiteHouse.gov has released some of their proprietary code as open source pieces of the existing Drupal project.  This isn't good news for any particular reason other than the fact that there's little reason for them to do it other than to contribute to the open source community and make the web a better place.  Good karma, more than anything.

Bad News:   

The crazy are getting crazier.  Arizona was already a pretty scary state when you stop to think about how many times they elected John "Get Off My Lawn You Damned Kids!" McCain.  Now they've passed an incredibly draconian immigration law that will essentially bring a little piece of Nazi Germany to the desert state.  They're just a few more legislative sessions from requiring brown people to wear yellow stars wherever they go.  

And because I can't possibly let you go on that note, here's an incredibly of an octopus that's ready for its closeup: